Issue 3 · July 14, 2026 · Libera Mondo Newsletter

India arrests Adivasi land defender

Assam police arrested Pranab Doley, a prominent Indigenous land-rights defender, on July 12 in Guwahati and placed him in seven days' custody, according to Survival International and Indian civil-society groups. Doley, who convenes the Greater Kaziranga Land and Human Rights Protection Committee, was booked under multiple provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, several of them non-bailable, over protests against the allocation of community land near Kaziranga National Park to a hotel development that his committee says has displaced Adivasi families. Rights groups called the arrest an attempt to criminalize Indigenous peoples' opposition to the loss of their land.

China's ethnic unity law takes effect

China's Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, adopted in March, took legal effect on July 1. It makes Mandarin the primary language of schools and government, requires curricula to "forge a strong sense of the community of the Chinese nation," and obliges parents to raise children in a unified national identity. An extraterritorial clause lets authorities pursue people outside China for "inciting ethnic separatism." At a Human Rights Council side event and again on the effective date, Uyghur and Tibetan representatives, joined by UN High Commissioner Volker Türk, called for the law's repeal, warning that it writes the assimilation already imposed in Xinjiang and Tibet into national statute.

Iran sentences and re-prosecutes Baha'is

Iranian courts stepped up action against the Baha'i community in early July. On July 7, a revolutionary court in Yazd sentenced a Baha'i woman to five years in prison and ten years' deprivation of social rights for "propaganda activity contrary to the sacred law of Islam" through promoting her faith, according to rights monitors citing the Baha'i International Community. Days earlier, 26 Baha'is in Shiraz were summoned to an appeals hearing set for late July, reopening a case that had ended in acquittal in 2023. The Baha'i International Community counted 55 members imprisoned or detained across Iran for their beliefs as of July 3, among them people held for months without disclosed charges.

Mob attacks Coptic church in Minya

On July 8, a mob of dozens stoned a Coptic church building in the village of Tal al-Qibliya, in Egypt's Minya province, injuring several Christians and damaging the building and the priest's car, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and Christian Solidarity Worldwide. Police arrested four of the assaulted Christian men and released them on July 10 after they withdrew their complaints against the attackers. The rights groups said authorities had been warned of harassment beforehand and failed to intervene. The village had lacked a church for years; residents had worshipped in rotating homes before designating the building. Copts are Egypt's largest religious minority.

UN rights council session ends in split votes

The UN Human Rights Council closed its 62nd session in Geneva on July 8. On July 6 it renewed the mandate of the special rapporteur on Eritrea, but only after China forced a recorded vote; the resolution passed 23 to 6 with 17 abstentions and cited Eritrea's "transnational repression" of critics abroad. On July 3 the Council held an urgent debate on North Kordofan, Sudan, adopting by consensus a resolution condemning escalating violence by the Rapid Support Forces around el-Obeid. Seventeen of the Council's members abstained on the Eritrea vote, neither backing the mandate nor joining the states that opposed it.

Landslides kill Rohingya as funding falls

Monsoon landslides tore through Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, between July 4 and 9, killing at least 17 people and displacing more than 3,000, Human Rights Watch reported on July 13. The group said the deaths were foreseeable: cuts to humanitarian funding had halted work to reinforce shelters against the rains, and the camps' shelter appeal was only 42 percent funded, short by nearly $74 million. About a million Rohingya remain in the camps, stateless, nine years after fleeing military violence in Myanmar. Separately, Bangladesh formed a committee to draft a repatriation strategy within 90 days.